You and Me
by Dude Van Gogh
Summary: When the pretending stops...


You and Me

The Watchtower

The room had emptied of all the heroes, except for the two of them that remained. They had been around each other a million times, yet somehow today felt different. They both had so much on their plate, that romance seemed almost pointless. He was sort of interested in another. She was known to be attracted to someone else. They kept looking at each other. God, she was incredibly beautiful. He maybe the most handsome man I've ever seen. Why were they still pretending?

He'd spent all his life trying to fit in. He was the ultimate immigrant story, trying to be exactly like everyone else around him. He did his best to appear true blue, red blooded, a Boy Scout, Americana as apple pie and cigarettes for the troops, yet he was always pretending. He was tired of blending in. He was tired of pretending he wasn't an alien. He was tired of pretending he was, hey, just like you and me, because everyone knew he wasn't. If only for right now, for this moment with her, he wanted to drop all the bullshit. He was fucking Superman, Goddamn it.

What was she waiting for? She wasn't like anyone else and everyone knew it. The truth was she was a Goddess. The truth was that the title of Wonder Woman was pretty accurate; she was a wonder and a woman. In the moment she had to ask herself was she being honest when she pretended to be less than she was? If her lasso really burned away falsehood, than how could she pretend she was just like everyone else? She was fucking Wonder Woman.

The safe thing to do would be to complete the immigrant story and woe and marry the regular girl. Shit, Lois was gorgeous, brilliant and everything an ordinary guy would want. You'd be lucky to get a girl like Lois. Hell Lana had all the same qualities plus the added bonus that they had been high school sweethearts. Yeah, that was the safe, tried and true way to play it. Everyone would say yeah, he really is just like us after all. Of all the women in the galaxy he picked an ordinary human woman to ground him, make him not quite so special. That's what they really want to not be reminded that he's so amazingly different. That we are so ordinary compared to him. He's not really that Super when you get right down to it.

The easy thing to do would be to settle. She was from an almost a mythical place. Her father was a God and her mother was an immortal. She was as alien to the average person as he was. So if she settled for the best humans could offer, Bruce, suddenly she wasn't so strange, so alien to everyone. Even among her sisters, her fellow Amazons, even before they knew her true origins they instinctively knew she was different, not like them. For their benefit she pretended like she was the same as everyone else, just another trained female warrior in the service of the cause.

As they looked at each other across the table they wondered when does it all stop? When do we stop pretending? From the beginning they had been natural friends, seeing in each other what most didn't want to see. Friends, just friends, because if they were more than that people started getting nervous. Because if they acknowledged the natural attraction that everyone else saw, then they would be forcing everyone to deal with the fact that they were extraordinary, different from everyone else.

Yet it was always there.

He was a man and she was a woman. Each of them was the temptation the other couldn't resist. He could be who he really was with her. She didn't have to pretend to be less than what she really was with him. Like magnets, they would always be attracted to each other. All that fairy tale BS was just that, BS. Soul mates, the myth that they needed to be tethered to the world, the idea that if they weren't with ordinary humans they wouldn't understand their concerns. Why? They lived on this planet just liked everyone else? If anything their special gifts put them more in-tune with everyday existence. They heard the suffering from everywhere, all the time. Neither could shut out the misery around them even if they tried.

Five years had gone by. Hadn't they proven over and over what their motives were? Five years of denying who they really were and what they wanted. When did it stop? When did the needs of the many finally stop outweighing the needs of the few? When did it stop outweighing the needs of the two most unique beings on the planet? Where was the line that separated private from public? When did they get to say I want this for myself?

As they looked across the table at each other, Kal and Diana knew the moment had finally come when all the bullshit stopped. Everything else in their lives might go on the same, but for this one moment they both understood that the pretense had to stop, even if it was only between themselves.

"Kal."

"Diana."

In the next moment they embraced. The pretending stopped.


End file.
